


Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge

by throughadoor



Category: China Mountain Zhang - Maureen F. McHugh
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-18
Updated: 2012-05-18
Packaged: 2017-11-05 14:09:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/407302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throughadoor/pseuds/throughadoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am Teresa Luis but also Comrade Li Taiming, because my great-great grandfather Rafael José Luis y Iglesias was born in the old United States, became a founding member of the Reformed American Communist Party and died defending the Brooklyn Bridge at the start of the Second Civil War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kyra Cullinan (Kyra)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra/gifts).



_And Tang Tai-tsung and Sung Tai-tsu_  
 _Had little poetry in their souls_  
  
\-- Mao Zedong, "Snow"

If the heart of the people lives in the future of the revolution, our history must live in our names.

My great-great grandfather was Rafael José Luis y Iglesias. If my name was like his, it would be Teresa Maria Luis y Sullivan, but from my birth certificate to my system record, I am just Teresa Luis.

I am Teresa Luis but also Comrade Li Taiming, because my great-great grandfather Rafael José Luis y Iglesias was born in the old United States, became a founding member of the Reformed American Communist Party and died defending the Brooklyn Bridge at the start of the Second Civil War. There's a pixilated photo and three paragraphs about him in _A People's History of the Socialist Union of American States_ , but in the middle school text books his name is Comrade Li Chen. 

The chapter about Christopher Brin explains how party members took Chinese names to protect their identities from the capitalists and to defend themselves against infiltration. So Brin was a Bronx school teacher, the father of the revolution and also Comrade Wáng Wěi, but, other than those three paragraphs, Rafael José Luis y Iglesias was lost to history.

Because I can trace my family's RACP membership back all these moldy generations, I am grandfathered in. All this means is that I can join the party without a sponsor. Of course, if my great-great grandmother had been the party member, you would still call it grandfathering, because the English language is the enemy of egalitarian society. But everybody knows that from Mandarin class all the way back to primary school, when the teacher leads a chorus of five-year-olds through the four tones. 

The first thing I learned in primary school Mandarin was how to pronounce and shape your words to make yourself understood, pitching your tone high to say _mā_ for "mother" and not the low dip of _mă_ , which means "horse." There's no contextual tone in the Indoeuropean languages, that's why we need so many different words to say the same thing.

 

Here is Comrade Li Taiming, late to political study group. Again. My group meets at Ruth Zweig's apartment, off 18th Avenue, and much closer to the 18th Ave stop on the F train. I'm late, though, so I take the N to 18th Ave and walk. It feels like it should be faster, to walk down Cristoforo Columbo instead of waiting at the subway to change trains. The truth is probably the exact opposite, but I can't believe that no matter how fast I walk, it would be faster to stand still. 

That might be why I'm always late. 

I buzz up to the apartment, already apologizing, and again when Ruth lets me in, and again when I squeeze through to take the last empty seat in the haphazard circle of mismatched chairs. "Sorry, sorry, sorry," I say. Everyone else has this week's reading. I can see Comrade Wu Mei's copy, the margins crammed with notes in perfect tiny handwritten characters. 

I was going to print a flimsie to read on the train but I didn't have time. I reach for the bowls of snacks on the table, for something to do with my hands. Ruth puts out the same snacks every week: matzo-crusted fried tofu, pastrami egg rolls, red bean rugelach. Things she probably picks up at the deli on the corner, because who has time to cook. 

They're already discussing the reading. "Let's go back to the article," Comrade Li Bao-xing says. "'The very basic foundations for love between man and woman are common political understanding, comradeship in work, mutual help and mutual respect.'" 

"Well, that's your problem right there," says Comrade Feng Wen Sheng, laughing in advance of his own joke. "That's love, and we're talking about marriage. Two totally different things. The purpose of marriage was to ensure the transfer of property."

"To treat women like chattel, you mean," Ruth says. On paper, she's Comrade Ren Zhiming, but she never uses her party name except to sign the attendance list. "In feudal times, wives literally became the property of their husbands." 

Wen Sheng dismisses her with rolled eyes. "Women weren't actual property," he says. "Women weren't, you know, land parcels. You're overreacting to an antiquated cultural metaphor." He leans back in his chair, but he's as nonchalant as a three-year-old having a tantrum. Wen Sheng is like a badly drawn cartoon, he and his pencil mustache should be on the Saturday morning vid, telling his off-screen wife to fetch his slippers, and then fuming until smoke comes out of his ears when they sail through the air and smack him in the forehead. 

Like every other political study group in Brooklyn, right now we're reading _One Hundred Flowers_. It's a new book of old ideas, Chinese student essays from the period of ideological liberalization before the Great Leap Forward. I like the title because I love the bits of Mao that sound like they could be poetry: _Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend_. Tonight's reading is "The Correct Viewpoint Toward Marriage," which sounds like the name of a hygiene pamphlet. 

"But we can agree," says Bao-xing, book balanced open in her lap, "that feudal marriage perpetuated land ownership, and land owning is one of the root causes of generational poverty." 

The book cover is bright orange like a marigold blossom, and I see so many copies out on the subway that the N train looks like a wildflower meadow. Last year, we were all reading the new Engels biography, next year it'll be something else. Christopher Brin is probably spinning in his grave, almost a hundred years since he smashed the capitalist state and Americans still haven't eliminated fads. 

"So marriage is poverty?" Mei asks. "I don't think that's what the article is about." Most of us either bring our books or print this week's article onto one of those reusable reader flimsies, but Comrade Wu Mei has her book and her flimsie full of notes. She also has another half dozen books and a pile of flimsies in her satchel. Mei thinks political study group is still Red Hook Middle School, and she can land a spot inside if she does enough extra credit. 

Mei is Puerto Rican, and she says her family can trace their lineage all the way back to the Chinese who came to Puerto Rico to cut sugarcane during the first Diaspora. She implies this has all been verified with a deep genetic scan. She dislikes me because we went to middle school together and I know her birth name is Adela Trujillo. 

"Well, not exactly," Ruth says to Mei. "Land ownership is poverty."

"The class system is poverty," adds Bao-xing.

"Poverty is the unjust death," I say, not really thinking, except that Ruth and Bao-xing sound like a nursery rhyme. Then, I realize everyone is now looking at me. I'm holding a half-eaten piece of red bean rugelach. "Well, what I mean is," I say, feeling the rugelach turn to greasy crumbs in my fingers. "The greatest injustice of poverty is that to be poor is to be insignificant."

I look toward Mei but not at her, so I don't seem too confrontational, or as my mother likes to say, hot-headed. For the first time tonight, I notice there's a Chinese guy in an army uniform sitting next to her. I don't recognize him. He's perched beanpole straight in one of Ruth's old stuffed armchairs and his uniform shirt and pants are as crisp and sharp as Japanese origami. 

He must think I'm looking at him, because he says, "If the correct viewpoint toward marriage is a foundation of mutual help and respect, the intent is not just to dismantle feudalism, but also to ensure mutual significance." He stares right at me as he talks, like it's just the two of us, chatting about feudalism over coffee.

"--yes, yes, and generational poverty through land ownership and marital transfer of property," says Wen Sheng. For once, I'm grateful for his macho pig-headed tangents, because it gives me an excuse to break eye contact with the guy in the army uniform. He's really, really Chinese. He's probably _zhongguo ren_ , a citizen. _Nombre de Dios_ , what is he doing here?

 

Still feeling guilty for my lateness, I stay after to help Ruth clean up the leftover snacks. I look up from a bowl of cold tofu and soggy matzo meal crust and see the _zhongguo ren_ soldier standing across the table.

"Comrade, nice to meet you," he says. 

"Comrade Li Taiming." I say. "I hope you enjoyed our little discussion."

"It was a pleasure, Comrade Li."

The creases in his uniform still look paper-cut sharp, but up close I can see ZHANG stenciled across the breast pocket. It's not so different from the janitor's uniform my brother Carlos wears, except it wouldn't take my mother's disapproving glare to get this uniform onto an ironing board. Though my _Tío_ Pedro did always say Mama could have been a drill sergeant. 

"Comrade Zhang," I say, realizing I have become lost in my own thoughts, standing across from him and making a goldfish mouth. "Or is it Commander Zhang?"

 _Aye Dios mío_ , I shouldn't have said that. 

"'We are all comrades in the People's Struggle,'" he intones like a page from the Little Red Book. "But to my army comrades, I am merely a lieutenant. I just wanted to tell you, I appreciated your comments about poverty," he says. "'To be poor is to be insignificant.' That's really interesting. Is it something from Engels?"

I make the _nali-nali_ with my hand, please don't talk about it, like my Mandarin teacher used to do when the school principal came by our classes to flirt with her, telling her she made the mother tongue rise and fall like beautiful music. "I am not so learned," I say. "Merely the idle words of a silly girl who forgot to read this week's article." 

I'm being offensive, putting on a show of mocking proper Chinese manners, but what am I going to tell him, that he can read more about the Three Principles of Poverty in Gutierrez's _Teología de la Liberación_? Just some light liberation theology for you, Lieutenant Zhang, it's barely even on the restricted materials list, I borrowed my copy from my _maricón_ priest uncle. 

A small sigh escapes me. Time to change the subject. "Your English is very good," I say to him, a nice safe Chinese compliment.

"Thank you, but I'm from San Diego Island."

"How long have you been stationed there?"

"I was born there, actually."

"Oh! You just seem very--" _Santa María_ , my face must be on fire. I could die on the spot. Of course he's _huaqiao_ , China hasn't sent citizen-volunteers to serve in the American People's Army since the Salt Lake Massacre, and that was before I was born. There's no salvaging this, new subject. "What brings you to New York?" I ask. He must feel like he's having a conversation with a leapfrog. 

"My unit is stationed out at Journal Square, in New Jersey. We're guarding the work camp, the Reform Through Labor volunteers are laying down the last of the track for the new high speed train from West Virginia. I get a two-day pass twice a month."

Convict labor. Not guarding the workers for their protection, but guarding them from further transgression, or escape. No weekend passes for the convict-volunteers. The thought makes a sour milk feeling curl in my stomach, but I ignore it. "Will the train really be finished in time for the Centennial?" 

"It is the will of the people," he says, and his mouth is a solemn line but his eyes are bright. He's teasing me.

"So you get two days off every two weeks and you used one of them to come to a political study group?" I tilt my head to show him I'm skeptical. 

"Comrade Wu," he says, nodding in the direction of Wu Mei. She's standing by the door, letting her satchel of books and notes weigh her down like she's Jesus shouldering the cross. It figures, Adela would think political study group was a perfect date. But then, "She's my cousin," Lieutenant Zhang adds, "and most gracious host. I have never been to New York, it's very--"

"Dirty?"

"--big. A lot bigger than the island I'm used to."

By the door, Mei tuts with impatience. "Comrade Li, it was nice to meet you," Lieutenant Zhang says. He nods to Ruth, who has finished cleaning up the snacks without me. "And thank you for welcoming me into your home, Comrade Ren." 

Wu Mei practically shoves him out the door.

 

It's not that I'm non-ideological. My parents taught me to believe in the Father, the Son and Marx and Mao Zedong. And, yes, Marx said religion was the opiate of the people, but Kierkegaard called belief in God the leap of faith, not belief in spite of doubt, but a commitment to belief strengthened by rational existence of doubt. Marx was looking for a pretty big leap of faith, from centuries of class struggle to proletariat revolution, and if I have faith in Marx, I don't see how it's any of his business if I have faith in God, too.

I don't like political study group because I feel like we've all been shoved together into one confessional booth. If religion is between you and the Holy Father, ideology should be between you and Chairman Mao. I joined the part, because my father said it would be a good idea, and that it would help me get a job. And even though Rafael José Luis y Iglesias great-great grandfathered my membership, I still have to go to political study group. My family can't afford to make any more mistakes right now.

So two weeks pass and here I am leaving work with my orange marigold book. 

My job is at Citinet, I work for the international banking department. I'm just a clerk, nothing important. Sometimes I get put on accounts that operate out of the free economic zone in Hainandao and I have to work late because of the time difference. Right now I'm on a Montreal account, because my boss found out I'm the only person in our division who speaks French. The Quebecois banks have outrageous hours, only open from 10 o'clock to 4 o'clock during the week and not at all on weekends, so I leave the office right on time and take a transfer to the F train.

Ruth serves bowls of pastrami egg rolls, matzo-crusted tofu and steamed chopped liver buns. We read an essay, "On the New Method of Intellectualism for the Proletariat," and Wen Sheng makes a dumb joke about the quality of women's intellect and three times Bao-xing tries to start a discussion on whether intellectualism is unfairly equivocated with the _bourgeois_ before she realizes that no one cares. 

And Lieutenant Zhang is here again. He probably comes to his cousin's study group on his weekend pass to look good for his army captain. I wonder if he went back to Journal Square and told the convict-volunteers that poverty is the unjust death. Maybe one of them will tell him he's quoting from the words of a disgraced Catholic priest.

After group ends, Lieutenant Zhang and Mei have a quiet disagreement, so polite you'd think they're talking about the weather except for the way Mei holds her giant satchel to her chest, like she needs it to soak up a bleeding wound to the heart. Mei leaves, and I'm about to duck out behind her when Lieutenant Zhang places himself in my way.

"Comrade Li," he says. "My cousin has another engagement this evening, and I'm not so eager to head back to the barracks. May I walk you home?"

"Oh, I take the subway."

"May I walk you to the subway?"

"Lieutenant Zhang, thank you for the offer, but the subway is two blocks from here."

"So we'll stroll, then?" he says, and I can't help but laugh out loud. He grins, knowing this means I've admitted defeat. "Great!" he says, clapping his hands together. "Please, call me Zhihong."

 

And so we stroll. Past the deli on the corner, to which Zhihong points and says, "Is that where Comrade Ran gets those delicious egg rolls?" It takes me a second to remember that he's talking about Ruth.

"Probably, I think so." Unless Ruth goes somewhere right when she gets off the train. You can get pastrami egg rolls at every kosher deli in Borough Park. "I guess the food here seems a lot different from California," I add. 

"Oh, sure. When I say I'm from California, everyone asks me if I miss the weather, but, Marx and Mao Zedong, what I really miss is the food. There are these food trucks right outside the base, and they sell _char siu_ tacos--" he trails off, caught up in his day dream of home. "You could get five for five _jiao_. When I was a kid, I used to eat all five of them myself."

"You grew up on the base?"

"Yeah, my dad's family has been Army as far back as anyone can remember. They say my great-great grandfather stormed the beaches of San Diego. My mother is from Nanjing, she's a nurse. She did a field rotation at San Diego Island and that's how she met my father."

He says it so casually, his mother's from Nanjing, from inside, a citizen. If they'd moved back there when her rotation was over, he'd be a citizen, too, the _zhongguo ren_ I mistook him for the first time I saw him. We're at the subway entrance, and I'm going to say thank you and goodnight and go home. 

"So, did you go to school for political theory?" he asks. 

_Madre de Dios_ , this man. "No, I went to the Red Hook Middle School for Language and Arts, with your cousin. I studied French and Italian. Plus, Mandarin, of course." In school, when Comrade Wu Mei was still Adela Trujillo, she was one of the Mandarin immersion students, who thought all the other languages were a waste of time.

"Wow, three languages at once," Zhihong says. "And, _también habla español, sí_?"

Well, yes, of course I also speak Spanish, but hearing it come out of his mouth, he might as well be speaking to me in Martian. 

"San Diego," he says, with explanation by way of a shrug. "You pick up the basics. Hello, how are you, _una cerveza, por favor_." We both laugh. I keep trying to be a bitch to this guy, and he keeps making me laugh.

"So, not Japanese?" he asks then. "My friends from growing up who wanted to be international bankers all studied Japanese."

"I never wanted to be a banker," I say, and the words spit out harsher than I expected, like they're gravel and broken glass. Do I look like someone who spent her whole life dreaming of bean counting, of routing imaginary money around the world? But Zhihong doesn't see Teresa Luis when he looks at me, he sees Li Taiming, who works at Citinet and reads _A Hundred Flowers_ on the subway.

And yet, suddenly I am saying, "I went to Red Hook because I wanted to study in the European Kingdom. There's an educational program, it's a new reform effort, you know, the whole ideological liberalization thing. Ten spots a year, to study in the EK." 

It's an exchange program, the EK sends ten students here, to study engineering and science, mostly. It's not as good as Beijing, but there are always _zhongguo ren_ who get stuck teaching over here, and I guess you can't get that in France. 

"My father had a friend at the Bureau of Education," I add, "and my language scores were always good."

"What did you want to study?"

"Poetry. I know it sounds--"

Frivolous, I am about to say, _bourgeois_ , but he cuts me off. "Romantic," Zhihong says. "It sounds very romantic."

A group of teenagers pushes past us, thundering down the subway steps, chattering to each other in Vietnamese and shaking me out of the fog that's kept me standing here for the last ten minutes. "Thank you again for walking me," I say, "but I should really go."

"I thank you for the stroll, Comrade Li," he says with a clowning formality.

I roll my eyes. "Your cousin probably told you already, but my name's Teresa. Teresa Luis."

He grins. " _Buenas noches, Señorita Luis_ ," he says. " _Hasta luego_."

 

I still live with my parents. The Chinese and the Latinos might not agree about much, but they definitely agree that a daughter should live at home until she lives with her husband. Anyway, my job at Citinet is a government placement, so it should come with housing, but the government housing lists are full. The more time I spend on the housing waitlist, the better my preference will be when housing becomes available. Still, the rumor is that once the high speed rail from West Virginia is complete, preferential government housing will mean an apartment in New Jersey instead of east Pennsylvania. Because my father's family has lived in Brooklyn since before the first Harvest of Central Park, we have government housing in Red Hook. 

My mother's crucifix hangs in hall of our apartment, just past the entryway. She's had the crucifix my whole life, but it hung in the kitchen until I was five. When she first moved it to the hallway, I thought she'd given up yelling at my brother and I for playing ball in the kitchen because we'd break something. But Carlos and I still weren't allowed to play ball in the kitchen and Mama taught us to cross ourselves at the threshold of the entryway every morning before we left the apartment. Years later, we learned in school about the New Doctrine for the People's Religious Practice and I realized that was why Mama moved the crucifix. 

And so two weeks after Zhihong walked me to the subway, the crucifix is on the wall behind me when he shows up at the door of our apartment. 

"What are you doing here?" 

"Forgive me," Zhihong says, looking down at his uniform cap in his hands, "but I looked up your address in the political study group's roster."

"But, what are you doing here?" I say. I'm repeating myself, but the question is not just 'what are you doing at my apartment?' but more like 'what are you doing my life?'

"Well, I thought I should take your advice."

"What advice?"

"You said there was more to see in New York besides political study group." 

"I don't know if that's exactly what I said."

"I was just wondering if you had any suggestions."

I just want him to go away. I do. I try to imagine there's a lemon wedge in my mouth so he can see it on my face. I say, "So, you showed up at my apartment?"

Zhihong ducks his head. "You're right, I apologize." He takes a step backward, says, "I'll let you get back to your afternoon."

"No, wait." _Madre de Dios_ , this man! But what kind of New Yorker would I be if I sent him off to sightsee on his own, he'd end up doing some awful tourist garbage like one of those Christopher Brin Taught Here bus tours. 

"Do you like boats?" I say. He grins, and it's a fight to keep the imaginary lemon in my mouth. "Well, okay, let's go ride the Staten Island Ferry."

 

Standing on the deck, waiting for the boat to depart from the terminal, Zhihong says, "So, I have a confession."

He bought two beers at the terminal for us to take on the boat. When he hands me mine, he gives me that look, the one guys make when they're waiting to see if a girl will wrinkle her nose at beer, so I twist off the cap and take a big sip. "You're not really in the army," I say. "That's just a costume rental you use to pick up girls."

"You caught me!" he says, tipping his beer bottle to clink it against mine. "But, listen, this is worse. I know that the Staten Island Evacuation was one of the First Five Acts of Solidarity, but I have no idea who got evacuated or why."

I look across the water and see another ferry boat chugging back toward us on its return trip. "Well, people used to live on Staten Island," I say. "The ferry would dock there, and people could take it to Manhattan for work or whatever. During the depression, there was a hurricane, a really bad one like the one that destroyed Miami." 

I half-remember that a big chunk of Staten Island used to be a garbage dump, which made it easier to flood somehow, but I don't remember why, so I skip over that part. 

"This was after the debt default," I say. "The city had already suspended emergency services and the people who lived on the island were stranded. So, the party got together their own boats and organized an evacuation. And that led directly to the Second Act, which is--" I trail off like an expectant school teacher, but he shrugs his shoulders, so I say "--the New York Stock Exchange Homeless Shelter."

"You know a lot about the Five Acts, huh?"

I shrug back at him. "Not really," I say, "I've just lived here my whole life." 

First came the Evacuation of Staten Island, then the New York Stock Exchange Homeless Shelter, then the Harvest of Central Park, then the Rockefeller Center Free Public School and finally the Stand at the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Growing up, my two favorite bedtime stories were Jesus Feeding the Multitude and the Harvest of Central Park. When I was six or seven, I asked my mother if the Harvest of Central Park was a miracle, like Jesus with the loaves and the fish. I remember because she said, "Oh, _mija_ ," and gave me that look your parents give you sometimes, when they're not mad, but you still know you did something wrong, the look you don't really understand until you're a lot older. My mother said, yes, maybe it was a miracle, but I shouldn't say that to the teacher when we learned about the First Five Acts in school. 

We both look out across the water for a few minutes, and then Zhihong says, "I guess we always spend the most time studying our own history, right? Fourteen years in school on San Diego Island, ask me anything you ever wanted to know about the Rose Canyon earthquake."

"Did San Diego really float out into the sea?" I'm baiting him a little bit, but it's always been hard to imagine, how a piece of California could just float away like a leaf on the wind. 

"It didn't float," he says. "There was a tectonic shift, combined with a tsunami and an on-going rise in sea level."

"So what does that mean?" I ask, twirling my beer bottle cap between my fingers like a _jiao_ coin.

"Oh, I have no idea."

"You said to ask you anything!"

"About, you know, what happened, not what any of it meant. That's like, hmm --" He squints at me, stroking his chin. "What's a stock exchange?" he asks.

I flick the bottle cap at him, but I'm laughing. It bounces off his chest and falls overboard. "Okay, that's fair," I say. "I have no idea."

The boat is skimming closer to the island now, and he points to a row of buildings along the coastline. "Those are barracks?" Zhihong says.

"Yeah, Staten Island was the first center for capitalist rehabilitation and re-education. But I don't think it's really been used since the sixties."

He nods. "People are more ideologically progressive now."

"Well, that and now most of the rehabilitation and re-education happens out on the corridor, right?"

"When I was a kid, I think. My father did a couple tours in Arizona. But now it seems like everybody goes to Mars."

"Is that where you're headed next?"

"I'm not sure," Zhihong says. I can see out of the corner of my eye that he's turned to look at me, even as I keep watching the rows of abandoned barracks.

 

It's late when the ferry returns us to the terminal, but the nights will stay warm until the end of December, so I tell Zhihong we should walk around Battery Park Pond. 

"Why didn't you go study in the EK?" he asks. And since he just comes right out with it like that, I start to tell him the truth.

"You know about my family," I say, because he has to know, he saw Mama's crucifix in the hall of our apartment. He might be a _huaqiao_ from California but he's not an idiot. "That we're Catholics, I mean."

"It's not a crime."

"Well, not anymore it isn't," I say. "But it was, for a long time after the revolution. And it's still illegal to refuse a job placement because you're pursuing religious practice."

"Okay."

"My _tío_ \-- my Uncle Pedro, he did that," I say. "My great-great grandfather was a party member during the revolution, but that's on my father's side, my mother's family are old school Catholics, all the way back before the war. The church isn't completely underground anymore, but they can't exactly run a seminary in the open, either. There's a way it's done. Your family tells everyone you're sick, Smallpox B, something really contagious, so no one wants to look for you. And there are places you can go, I think my _tío_ went somewhere upstate. He was ordained. You know what that means?"

Zhihong nods. Of course, there are probably still Hispanic Catholics in California, they've been there since before the beginning of the old United States.

"Anyway, by the time he came back, his name had fallen off the job rolls. It happens. Nobody in the neighborhood really asks questions, but word gets around that you don't have to go all the way out to Bushwick if you want to get your new baby baptized. And if they arrested every mother in Brooklyn who wanted a priest to baptize her kids, there'd be enough Reform Through Labor volunteers to build a high speed railroad from here to Mars. So they just don't."

We come up on a bench and Zhihong sits down, looking up at me to join him. I sit down next to him. We're at the edge of the pond where it feeds into the river, looking out over the water toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

"What happened, then?" he says. 

"The church breaks the government's rules, but my _tío_ broke the church's rules, and you can't do both."

"What do you mean?"

"The church, they found out he was --" A _maricón_ , a queer, a fag. "-- _invertido_ ," I say, finally, using my mother's word for it and trying not to picture her stricken face. "He was, you know, an inverted. He went with men."

Zhihong doesn't look disgusted, just confused. "I thought priests weren't supposed to go with anybody," he says.

I shake my head. "They're not. But they're really, really not supposed to go with other men. The church turned his name over to the party, for illegal pursuit of religious practice, made sure the kind of people found out who would want to make an example out of him. And now we don't know where he is." 

And then, because I am my mama's hot-headed daughter and I just don't know when to quit, I say, "Maybe he's in New Jersey, laying train track."

Neither of us says anything for a minute, and I hope he can take my silence for what it is, all the apology I know how to give. My uncle used to say, "It is not the revolution that is at fault, it is the people who are implementing it." It's not Zhihong's fault. He became a soldier for the same reason my uncle became a priest: they both wanted to be like their fathers. It's the church that put my uncle in Reform Through Labor and the Army that put Zhihong standing guard on the other side of the fence.

There's nothing left for me to do but finish the story. "So now my family's in trouble with the church and the party both at the same time. No more friend at the Education Bureau. No more exchange placement. I joined the party so I could get a job, and that was only easy because I was grandfathered in. And now, here I am."

Pink fingers of dawn are creeping up over the bridge. I realize we've stayed out all night. I'm 22 years old, but _aye Dios mío_ , Mama's gonna kill me. 

Zhihong looks up at the sky. "Wow," he says. "I see why they used to call this place the city that never sleeps."

"' _No duerme nadir por el cielo_.'"

"What did you say?"

"'Out in the sky, no one sleeps.' It's from this poem, it's called 'Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge.'"

"Someone wrote a poem about the Brooklyn Bridge?"

"Well, not exactly," I say. "But I guess that's what made me think of it. It's by Garc&iacutea Lorca, he was a Spanish poet, he studied in New York for a year in the 1920s, he wrote a book of poems about it later." 

_Tío_ Pedro gave me his copy of _Poeta en Nueva York_ when I started studying for the EK exam in middle school. Lorca's stuff isn't restricted, but there are a lot of books that don't need to be restricted because there just aren't any copies anymore. 

"What were his poems about?" Zhihong asks. He's slouched next to me on the bench, propped up by his spread arms, almost unrecognizable from the ramrod straight-backed _zhongguo ren_ I met in Ruth's living room. Or maybe that was just a person I thought I met, and I'm only now recognizing Zhihong.

"He was like you," I say. "He thought the city was too big and too dirty."

"Hey, I never said it like that!"

"His stuff is interesting. He lived here during the market crash before the First Great Depression, and he wrote all these poems about death, about the death of money and how greed and capitalism made the people rotten from the inside out." 

"So there's socialist poetry?"

"I mean, sure," I say, "there's poetry about everything. And Lorca was a socialist, he was killed by the fascists right before the first Spanish Civil War."

Zhihong watches me for a moment. "You should bring some of his poems to read at your study group," he says.

"Very funny," I say, even though there's no twinkle in his eyes. "You can't read poetry at a political study group."

"Why not?" he asks. "You just said there's poems about everything. I'd like to read them."

I know what he's trying to do. He thinks he can give me back something I've lost, show me that I don't have to give up poetry just because I didn't go to the EK. It's all there on his stupid hopeful face. But it's not that simple.

"I'd like to read them," he says again. "Consider it my intent to ensure a mutual significance."

And so I sit with Zhang Zhihong, and let his hand meet mine on the bench. What do we look like, sitting here? Two people who've been up all night. His uniform is wrinkled, and the braid of my hair must be unraveling like an old piece of knitting. But out in the sky, no one sleeps. I watch the sun come up over the Brooklyn Bridge, and decide to make a leap of faith.

**Author's Note:**

> works cited: Mao Zedong, "Snow," Gustavo Gutierrez, _Teología de la Liberación_ , Mao Zedong, "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," China Youth Daily, "The Correct Viewpoint Toward Marriage," Federico García Lorca, "Ciudad sin Sueño (Nocturno de Brooklyn Bridge)."
> 
> menu: [Katz's Pastrami Egg Roll](http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/cooking-recipes/story/2011-12-16/Pastrami-egg-rolls-from-NYC-Chinese-food-maven/52006824/1), [ red bean rugelach](http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/12/red-bean-rugelach.html</a), [matzo-crusted tofu](http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/12/matzoh-crusted-general-gaus-tofu.html). (Chopped liver steamed buns appear to be an entirely fictitious creation, thank Marx and Mao Zedong.)
> 
> thanks to: k8 for beta action.
> 
> As I said to this story's much-beloved recipient: _Livejournal dot com tells me that this is the first time I've posted a non-Yuletide story in SIX YEARS. The impending occasion of your nuptials: pretty much a big deal. As you once said to me, I hope that this story that is designed to commemorate a festive occasion is not too much of a bummer, _China Mountain Zhang_ only has one mood icon and it's ~~Steve Holt~~ melancholy ennui._


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